Skip to main content

Tchaikovsky: Symphony #6

Today we'll cover Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony, from a live CD recording by the Vienna Philharmonic under the baton of Valery Gergiev.
**********************
Valery Gergiev and the Wiener Philharmoniker
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)
Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 6
Philips, 2004
**********************
The Sixth was Tchaikovsky's last symphony, and many music historians consider it his requiem, as he died just nine days after the work's premier. Also, the circumstances surrounding his death were unclear--did he die of cholera, or did he commit suicide?--adding to the controversy surrounding this composer's already highly controversial life.

We'll discuss more about Tchaikovsky's life, and in particular his, uh, eccentric personal life, in future posts.

Listener notes for Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony:
1) It's strange, but after really enjoying this symphony earlier this year (on another CD), I seem to have gone a bit limp on Tchaikovsky's Sixth. This is kind of a new experience for me: typically once I decide I like a classical music work, I keep on liking it. For some reason, however, this symphony just doesn't enthrall me quite like it did back in June. Why?

2) However, I still fell in love, all over again, with the second movement. Only a Russian could write such beautiful music about death and suffering.

3) Back to the first movement for a second: one feature I do like very much comes at the very end. Listen underneath the melody to the descending notes plucked by the basses and cellos during the last minute or so of the first movement.





Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Does Bach Suck?

It's not often that you see a classical music-related comment that makes you spit out your coffee : "Bach sucks because he was not a true composer. A true composer hears the music before he writes it. Bach composed using a mathematical system of numbers which he tought[sic] his students. After his death one of his students published a book “How to write a menuet[sic] with little or no musical knowledge”. Frankly, the result of his work is not musical, the opening bars always sound musical because he copied someone else’s melody, broke it down into numbers and wrote counterpoint from it. Handel did not even like Bach, because Handel wrote music. Anyone who does like Bach does so because they are told to. For a comparison, listen to music by Frescobaldi, Rameau, or Couperin, then listen to Bach. The difference? Something that is musical throughout the entire piece, and something that is musical for 10 seconds and quickly loses interest." Once I'd finished mopping the co
15 comments
Read more

Why Classical Music Writing is So Difficult to Read

Have you ever read the liner notes of a classical music CD and scratched your head wondering what the heck the writer was trying to say? Or attempted to read a classical music concert review in your newspaper and felt totally illiterate? One of the things that frustrates many people about classical music is its perceived elitism. It's unfortunate, but most of what gets written about classical music only worsens that perception. Most of the classical music writing I see out there--either in symphony concert program books, in concert reviews in major papers like the New York Times, or worst of all in the little essays in the booklets accompanying most classical music CDs--is quite simply terrible. Often, it is pretentiously written, it is full of industry jargon (yes, even the classical music industry has its own jargon), and it reads like an intellectually insecure liberal arts student's PhD thesis. There are a few reasons for this. First, there's the fundamental difficulty
8 comments
Read more

Shostakovich: First Symphony

I can't help it. I just don't like Shostakovich. This is the second time I've tried my hand at a Shosty symphony, after listening to and heartily disliking his Eleventh Symphony . Unfortunately, I felt no emotional connection to his First Symphony either. The music seems random and arbitrary to me--and to be honest, I even caught myself rolling my eyes at a few of Shosty's musical devices. And as I'll show in the listener notes, it's more film score music than symphony. ********************** Leonard Bernstein and the Chicago Symphony Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) Shostakovich: Symphonies Nos. 1 & 7 Deutsche Grammophone, 1989 ********************** Lucky me: I've still got three more of his symphonies left to listen to: his Second, Seventh and Twelfth. A little historical background before we get to the listener notes: Shostakovich wrote his First Symphony in 1925 at the shockingly young age of 18. It was his graduation piece at the Leningrad Conserva
3 comments
Read more